Episode 68 of the Fast Talk podcast summarizes a bunch of concepts from their past episodes and interviews:
I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but it does cover a lot of ground for those interested in this topic.
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A good podcast to listen to on my long ride tomorrow!
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Thanks!
This is a great podcast!
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One of their better podcasts i thought. Interesting.
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New retrospective study on elites, this time swimmers:
elite swimmers’ training over the 25 weeks preceding the major competition of the season … retrospective observational study of elite male (n = 60) and female (n = 67) swimmers (46 sprint, 81 middle-distance) over 20 competitive seasons (1992-2012)
For the entire cohort, ~86‒90% of the training was swum at an intensity of [La]b ≤4 mmol.L-1. This training volume was divided into 40‒44% at <2 mmol.L-1 and 44‒46% at 2 to ≤4 mmol.L-1, leaving 6‒9.5% at >4‒6 mmol.L-1 and 3.5‒4.5% at >6 mmol.L-1.
For more details we’ll have to wait for the full text:
That’s interesting data - thanks for the reference!
@sryke and @robertk, I believe using nose breathing (for LT1, VT1) may work for a certain group of athletes, just like using 60% of HRmax to estimate LT1 may only work for some. For others it might be 70%. But the problem is, I don’t know if I belong to that group. But there is another point we should be aware of: are these estimates time invariant? If I test in the lab today and find that my LT1 is at 60% of HRmax, that does that mean it is fixed at 60% of HRmax and I can use this value for the rest of the season? I am not sure about that. The physiological state can vary from day to day, so IMHO, my LT1 could be 60% of HRmax today, but 65% of HRmax tomorrow. Measuring LT1 frequently in the lab is not feasible or affordable. So if SmO2 (Humon) could determine, or at least be accurate at estimating LT1/VT1 every time and keep me in the Z1 when I do a long slow ride, then it would be worth the actual price for me.
wrote some blogs back in January after the velonews podcasts…not a polarized fan for the 98% of us that aren’t pro riders.
Blog 1:
Blog 2:
https://www.evoq.bike/blog/2019/1/11/polarized-training-for-cycling-in-2019
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The 3rd installment from Fast Talk: (Discussion starts around 10:30, after the looong intro…)
Fair warning, the off-topic around 1 hour in is painful to my ears and patience (Trevor’s lack of a love life 
).
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That was a low point wasn’t it!! Almost deleted it at that point. Beginning to struggle with Trevor a bit now tbh. Some decent interval advice near the end but nothing of huge benefit.
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@Supermurph19 I agree about Trevor. I also liked the interval advice. Unlike the first two parts, I liked Seiler reminding mostly Trevor us about duration. I felt like the “80/20” discussions and the first two podcasts really focused too much on intensity. What makes endurance exercise “hard” is both intensity and duration. Perhaps they heard some pushback and course corrected the message. Either way, good stuff there.
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Just listened to this over 3 nights before bed (the “podcast hour” for me), so I may have missed some bits as I was starting to drop off, or might have picked up the wrong end of the stick. Corrections / additions welcome!
Main takeaways were:
- Find the right balance between intensity and duration.
- Note that 4x8min isn’t a “magic bullet” interval session, it’s just the one that worked the best out of 4x4, 4x8, and 4x16. He said specifically that other lengths and quantities of intervals could work - I can’t remember what he suggested but it sounded very similar to Elephants.
- Better to do hold back a bit and recover for the next session than go all-out and knock yourself out for a few days.
- That for racing over 6 minutes, anaerobic interval work has limited use and could even be detrimental to your aerobic power. The prescription seemed to be a maximum 3-4 week “tune-up” before starting racing.
- That training at a particular intensity doesn’t just make you better at that one intensity. A 4x8min session, even though it’s performed at +/-105% FTP, will also improve your 1 minute power, for example.
For me the most contentious point is about the anaerobic work. It seems to suggest that for a 60-90 minute rolling road race, you should still concentrate primarily on the aerobic zone and even actively avoid too much anaerobic work. Whereas the TR prescription (short/general power build, rolling road race speciality) involves a lot of short, high intensity intervals. Are they contradictory or do the two approaches have more in common than it appears?
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I’m not sure that the two approaches are as far opposed as you have interpreted.
First - I think for any racing where you’re trying to cross the line first they are saying you need a large enough aerobic engine to get you to the finish where you can utilize your anaerobic engine. If you overdevelop your anaerobic capabilities it limits your aerobic engine - but if your aerobic engine is still sufficient to get you to the finish so you can utilize your anaerobic then you’re fine.
What follows from this is that the TrainerRoad approach, which introduces intervals of various lengths, is attempting to balance these whereas the 4x8 approach Seiler is advocating is saying you get the benefits across the board from the longer intervals (as you mentioned).
Second - when they propose you only need a few weeks to tune up race/sprint performance I think they aren’t that different from what you see in the speciality plans - the truly all out sprint efforts don’t start until late in your plan, close to your race date. The workouts like Spanish Needle are a (relatively) low FTP % to count as anaerobic, and it is the repetition and short recovery that makes the workout hard (and thus a largely aerobic improvement)
The thing that this most recent podcast didn’t address, that I found problematic, was the boredom of repeating the same sets over and over again. They did talk about doing the same thing for 3-4 weeks and then changing from 4x8 to 4x4 or similar - but even that would feel overly repetitive to me.
I find the variance we get in the TrainerRoad workouts helpful on a day to day basis. Frankly, if every interval session I had on the calendar for the month of June was exactly the same I would find that more challenging to complete. Obviously everyone will have a different tolerance for this but I’d have liked them to talk more about how the variance in training can help or hurt motivation instead of simply focusing on how overly complex intervals are not necessary and not worth planning around
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Ah yes, good point well made. It’s easy to forget how short intervals with short recovery also get aerobic pretty quickly. I suppose the rule of thumb is, are you out of breath? Then it’s at least partly aerobic.
Definitely. It’s not a TR session, but I’ve got an outdoor session planned tomorrow which is 45 seconds @ 120% followed by a 15 second all-out effort then a 2 minute recovery - 3 sets of 4. And the little bit of extra brainpower it takes to stick to those powers and the combination of different target powers makes it that much more interesting and rewarding to complete.
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yeah… truly anaerobic intervals are only like 30s to 1 min and with about 5 min recovery in between. I really feel the TR style short rest, but in “anaerobic” zone, quickly turn aerobic after the first 2 or 3 or you’ll get too much acid buildup in your muscles to complete them as planned.
Just like MTB has a lot of anaerobic surges in there, doing repeats at a high, but not too high level stresses the aerobic system and makes them more repeatable.
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Haha, I agree that I had that at one point listing to this podcast, but I believe they did address it: proposing basically the same thing as you see in TR, with small tweaks to the interval duration / count / rest period over the course of a given training block. Start with more / shorter intervals, and longish rest periods, then tweak the intervals over the course of a block to have more total minutes at intensity of longer individual duration with shorter rest periods between.
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Interesting podcast. Sort of the antithesis of Trainer Road. Lots to think about.
I gave it a listen today, but was not able to give full attention. I need to listen again with more focus. But it was a good one.
Thanks for this link, not a podcast I had been aware of. First 35 minutes is excellent, really like their take on things. Interesting to see Xert and INSCYD being used.
I think also realistically, even though there may not be a VO2 fitness gain from doing event specific styled intervals, there are lots to be learned from doing them and knowing your individual limits. The thing about elites is that they race a lot, so they find that out racing. So much of being good at racing is knowing yourself and what you can do. Chad even confirmed it when I mentioned that the specialization phase he’s set up is not so much about fitness gains any more, but getting that mental toughness and knowledge of what you can do, and possibly how to better pace some of those efforts. So of course we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water, I personally don’t mind repeating a workout a few times during a block since I have done some repeat base periods back to back to back, but it really don’t take that long to adapt to really high power intervals, and the fitness doesn’t stay that long either. The old classic teachings were that you only did the really hard intervals in the ~month prior to your event season, with the understanding that those gains are quick, but also fade quick if not maintained.